Thanks to Dennis for this. A while ago, I posted about a way to delete connections to a class (CL24n type stuff) even after it had been used in transaction. The method I listed certainly worked, but with the caveat of it should NOT be done in production. The biggest reason behind that statement is that it could (or most likely would) leave one or many sales orders inconsistent, forcing you to visit each one to refresh the configuration. A royal PITA. Well, my friend Dennis found another approach, that I’ll certainly recommend going forward.
Using exit “EXIT_SAPLCUCP_005” combined with a new Z table to handle to put the material that want to delete regardless from a given class . The deletion needs to be carried out using engineering change management and the change date is in the future. In the user exit we could check the class type , aennr , matnr in the Z table that we want to override the deletion . If allowed by that Ztable , return deletion allowed flag to let the object deleted regardless of the SAP telling us that the configurable objects exists and cannot be deleted.
By including the change number/future date portion of this, it should eliminate any sales order inconsistencies, since it will not go into the past. Please note, I haven’t tried this specific approach, but it certainly warrants a closer look if you find yourself with materials or classes accidentally attached to the wrong class (and let’s be honest, it happens more than any of us would like to admit).
So thanks Dennis and thanks everyone for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike